Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Behind the Scenes with Andy Serkis

Ever wonder how primates in Planet of the Apes came to rule the world? Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a new prequel out August 5, shows how genetic engineering tipped the odds in the apes' favor. Popular Mechanics visited the set to see the performance-capture tech that turned actor Andy Serkis and others into on-screen chimps. Plus we bring you the details on how the VFX house WETA Digital—the folks behind Avatar's visual effects—made the film's apes look real.

Andy Serkis is monkeying around—or aping around, as the case may be. It's late September 2010, and we are on the Vancouver, Canada, set of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the upcoming prequel to the classic Planet of the Apes franchise. Serkis hangs one-armed from the monkey bars of a jungle gym, grunting as he swings gracefully to the other side. The actor, who stars as the chimp Caesar, is decked out in a gray spandex suit studded with motion-capture markers, and wears a helmet equipped with an arm that holds four tiny cameras less than a foot away from his face. Those cameras capture his eyes and facial expressions via 52 dots painted on the actor's face. Unlike the Apes films that came before, Rise won't rely on costumes and prosthetics to create its primates, but instead will use the groundbreaking performance-capture technology developed for Avatar.

Set in modern-day San Francisco, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (opening August 5, 2011) will explain how apes come to rule the world 5000 years in the future, when the original films take place. Dr. Will Rodman's (James Franco) experiments on primates—performed in search of a cure for Alzheimer's disease—genetically alters Caesar, giving him advanced intelligence that enables him to incite the ape revolution. Principal photography wrapped a couple of weeks before PM's visit, but when we arrive, Serkis and a few other actors-playing-apes are still shooting sequences of the film, and they were more than happy to show us how to create digital on-screen primates.

We're in the Volume, a large, virtually empty set ringed with dozens of cameras that send out infrared light, which bounces off the reflective markers on the actors' suits. Those same cameras capture the signal and send it to giant televisions around the set, which show the actors in real time as their primate avatars. Reference cameras, positioned on tripods around the Volume, film the performances. Visual-effects artists from WETA Digital, which is creating the film's VFX, monitor the data and video feeds from the cameras filming the actors' faces. They will use the combined information from all these cameras to create fully realized, photo-real primates, which in this sequence are running amok on the Golden Gate Bridge.

"We use this space for character building, so we can understand how our bodies relate to the digital puppets you see on those screens," Serkis says. "The performance-capture cameras track these markers, like coordinates for your joints. You're basically puppeteering an electronic skeleton in real time—you can see the simplified CG ape puppets moving in absolute synchronicity with our performances, and we use the real-time playback to check what we're doing. The markers on our faces are tracked by these head-cams, which have tiny little LED lights all around them, in great detail." At another set—a strikingly realistic primate facility with real-function cages designed by Claude Paré, which is where Caesar is taken after displaying aggressive behavior—the performance-capture technology is even more advanced: Rather than the passive, reflective system used in the Volume, this set uses active performance capture in which the ape-playing actors wore suits with blinking LEDs, which were synchronized to the cameras to create the points the cameras would track.

While the technology must capture Serkis's motion faithfully, the actor—who has also played the title role in King Kong—had to learn to act and move like a chimp. "We've learned how chimpanzees or orangutans express themselves facially," he says. "And we often use arm extensions for quadrupeding." Terry Notary, who plays the ape Alpha and also coached the actors on movement, designed the arm extenders: modified, shortened crutches with metal cuffs and grips that lengthen the actors' arms, enabling them to adopt the postures of apes. When Serkis and Notary give us a lesson in walking like primates, it becomes immediately obvious that using the arm extenders is harder than it looks. That makes the actors' smooth movements—loping down a steep ramp without falling end over end, for example—all the more impressive.

Director Rupert Wyatt explains why he opted for performance capture rather than prosthetic makeup for the apes: "This is a story of real chimpanzees, real apes, unlike the original where you're talking about humanoids," he says. "Prosthetic makeup could never replicate real primates. With performance capture, you have the opportunity for a human actor to get underneath the skin, literally and emotionally, of a chimp and actually become invisible."

But did method acting and the advanced performance-capture systems create convincing digital apes? The end results are now coming out: Seven months after our visit to the Rise of the Planet of the Apes set, WETA Digital unveiled its first look at a moody Caesar in a 4-second clip. And April 13, VFX supervisors Joe Letteri and Dan Lemmon discussed creating the CG primates. Ten-foot-tall blue aliens like Avatar's are one thing; it's much easier for the human eye to accept something fantastical. But people know what primates are supposed to look like, making the challenge for WETA even more daunting.

"We really wanted to stay faithful to real chimps," Lemmon said. "We spent a lot of time looking at photo and video reference of real chimps. But we also wanted to take reality and alter it slightly so the performance could come through." Part of their success in creating a believable yet emotive look came from the fact that ape-playing actors could interact with the human characters on-set. "In Avatar, the Na'vi were 9 feet tall, [and] we couldn't capture them on the stage," Letteri said. "But in Apes, the performers are about same size [as apes]. It gave us the opportunity to have the performers on set the whole time with their live-action counterparts. So we were capturing everything in the moment." Lemmon said that the advanced motion-capture system also allowed them to shoot in full sunlight for the first time.

The full Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer hit the Web this morning; it included several scenes PM watched Serkis and company film on set. So far, we've only seen a few glimpses of the apes—with the exception of Caesar and Bright Eyes (the chimp's mother), most of the shots are from a distance or looking at apes from the back. But what we're seen so far looks great (check out the detail on the hands) and certainly sets an ominous tone. In the first look at Caesar, Serkis has all but disappeared into his primate counterpart. If he doesn't look exactly like your ordinary chimp—well, it's because he's not.